Hunting for Edward Hopper in Vermont

South Royalton woman highlights famous painter's Vermont connections

Nov. 17, 2012

Bonnie Tocher Clause stands on Three Mile Bridge, which crosses the Winooski River a couple miles north of Montpelier. Edward Hopper captured this Vermont bridge in his painting, 'Country Bridge.' Clause wrote the book 'Edward Hopper in Vermont,' which explores the iconic painter's time in the Green Mountain state. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

The cover of 'Edward Hopper in Vermont' by Bonnie Tocher Clause.

The watercolor painted by one of the most-famous American artists of the 20th century sat in Hopper’s New York City studio until his death at age 84 in 1967. Little was known about it except that it was likely created during one of the sojourns he took to Vermont in the 1920s and ‘30s with his artist wife, Josephine. Clause, a longtime fan of Hopper’s work, wanted to know more, and took to the Internet to find out just where the bridge in the painting was located.

She went to the website of the University of Vermont Landscape Change Program, which posts photos of locations in the state from years gone by compared to the present day. Clause pored over the website’s photos of bridges until she found the one that had to be the subject of “Country Bridge.” The photo showed a steel truss bridge that no longer has the distinctive smaller arch shown in Hopper’s work from the 1930s, but the remainder of the span and the surrounding landscape indicated that the Three Mile Bridge, which crosses the Winooski River a couple miles north of the Montpelier exit off Interstate 89, had to be the one.

“That was a really lovely find,” Clause told a crowd that gathered on a recent Saturday night at Phoenix Books in Burlington to hear her talk about her new book, “Edward Hopper in Vermont.” If she still sounded excited months after making that connection, Clause said, it’s because she still is excited.

Edward Hopper and Bonnie Tocher Clause were on quests when they created, in his case, “Country Bridge,” and, in her case, “Edward Hopper in Vermont.” He came to Vermont on an inherently quixotic mission to make the perfect landscape painting. She was seeking to learn more about an artist whose paintings are well-known but whose soul is nearly impenetrable. Hopper, when asked what he was “after” with his paintings, famously answered, “Me.” Even he seemed stymied by his mysterious persona.

'A very lonely man'

Edward Hopper is most famous for “Nighthawks,” an oil painting he finished in 1942 that depicts melancholy city-dwellers in a forlorn diner. His bleak, dispassionate urban paintings capture the sensation of being alone in a crowd that, by all accounts, captures Hopper’s personality as well.

“I had many discussions with Edward Hopper. He was a very lonely man,” according to a quote Clause attributed in her book to gallery owner Lawrence Fleischman. “Always there was a loneliness about him. He was very sweet, very gentle, and very deep.”

“Hopper, I think,” Clause said at her talk at Phoenix Books, “was a perpetually restless soul.”

Unlike his more famous city scenes, Hopper’s Vermont landscapes have no people in them. Yet they have a comforting if unsentimental feel that’s hard to find in his urbanized works.

“One of the reasons Hopper is so popular,” Clause said, “is that we are able to project a lot of things into his paintings.”

Clause, from Philadelphia, was fond of Hopper’s work before she moved part-time to South Royalton in 2005. As she tells the story in her book, and as she repeated at Phoenix Books, she was searching on eBay for Vermont-related artwork to hang in her new home when she encountered “Barn and Silo, Vermont,” a Hopper painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

She said she was amazed to learn that the artist best known for city scenes, and somewhat known for his landscapes of Maine and Massachusetts, created about three dozen watercolors and drawings in Vermont. Then she found out the barn and silo in question, along with many of Hopper’s other Vermont landscapes, were painted in and around her new hometown of South Royalton.

“When I read that I was doubly amazed,” Clause said at her talk. “If you ask why did I write this book, I think it’s probably clear.”

Searching for new vistas

The Hoppers first visited Vermont in 1927 when they attended the Whitney Studio Club, a short-lived artists’ retreat just across the Connecticut River. “New Hampshire afforded a window and a gateway into Vermont,” Clause writes in her book. “With the easy mobility provided by their Dodge, the Hoppers may have welcomed the chance to escape from the other artists of the Whitney’s temporary colony in Charlestown, as well as an opportunity to ‘roam ... to spots most worth while to paint ... ’”

They didn’t return to Vermont until 1935, when Hopper was desperate for a new place to paint landscapes. At her talk, Clause read an excerpt from “Edward Hopper in Vermont” in which his wife wrote a letter to Hopper’s sister about their reasons for venturing out from their summer home in Cape Cod: “We’re leaving screech of dawn for Vermont — somewhere — to look for a canvas. E. hasn’t been able to do a thing here — has done it all already — needs new pasture for awhile. So, here we go — me adhering to a can of corned beef, jar of jam, cheese, bread ... and hard-boiled eggs, not to mention, salt, sugar, postum, etc., to keep expenses down. We’ll come back here ... E well (and fat) but worried about his work. Will let you know if we settle somewhere.”

They did settle somewhere — South Royalton, to be specific. This was during the height of the Depression, and many Vermont farmers took in boarders to augment their incomes. That’s how the Hoppers came to stay with Bob and Irene Slater, whose business card for their Wagon Wheels Farm, according to Clause’s book, touted the “comfortable double or twin beds, furnace heat, fireplace” and “abundance of fresh farm products.”

There were artistic benefits as well. Clause writes that “this rural farmhouse actually had amenities that might have made it seem like a resort to the Hoppers, whose summer home in South Truro still had no electricity or telephone ... And the setting of the farmhouse was ideal, at the base of the Slaters’ hillside pastures ... surrounded by the Green Mountains and close to roads that meandered through the valleys of the White River and three of its branches, with a different vista around every curve.

“Perhaps best of all for Edward Hopper,” Clause writes, “there were no crowds and no colony of artists ... South Royalton was well away from the beaten track of most artists and, for most of the year, that of most tourists, and the Hoppers settled in at Wagon Wheels Farm.”

They kept coming back, too, revisiting Vermont regularly through 1938. Hopper sounded as though he found his ideal setting to paint.

“These valleys of the branches of the White River and the White River valley itself are, to me, perhaps the finest in Vermont,” he wrote in a 1939 letter. The rest of the world, though, would be largely underwhelmed by the results of Hopper’s Vermont labors.

Receiving vindication

In her book, Clause noted that Hopper’s creations in Vermont were sometimes dismissed as his “vacation paintings.” She cited a New York Times review of his Vermont painting “Mountain Meadow” that called the watercolor “lumpy and lifeless.”

In her quest to discover Hopper’s Vermont paintings, Clause found that they deserve more credit than they typically receive. “In ‘Windy Day,’ Hopper has succeeded in painting the wind. It is seen in the rippled water, in the branches of the tree in the left mid-ground, in the clouds, and even in the pale colors of a cool day in early fall,” she writes in her book. “When the White River watercolors are assembled and looked at together — as is possible in this volume — the variations that Hopper was able to portray in this small series of works are astonishing.”

Three-quarters of a century after he painted in Vermont, and 45 years after his death, Hopper has received some vindication for his Vermont paintings. “Sugar Maple,” which Clause pointed out in her book was criticized for lacking “the focus that would have made it a star,” sold at auction in 2002 for $361,500. “Vermont Sugar House” was sold to a private owner in 2007 for $881,000, which Clause writes is “a spectacular price for this small watercolor of a humble icon of Vermont.”

Hopper’s Vermont watercolors will receive one more boost in May when the Middlebury College Museum of Art opens an exhibit titled “Edward Hopper in Vermont” featuring many of the works he painted in the state. Only one of Hopper’s Vermont watercolors has ever been shown in its state of origin, according to Clause: The cover art for her book, “First Branch of the White River,” which belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was part of an exhibit at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum in 1976 titled “Vermont Landscape Images: 1776-1976.”

Richard Saunders, director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, said the exhibition that opens May 23 and ends Aug. 11 should help illuminate much of what Clause writes about in “Edward Hopper in Vermont.”

“Her book is a biographical narrative to a great degree,” Saunders said. “She’s not an art historian. So that allowed us to play a role that could combine her storyline and also allow us to provide analysis of her pictures and try to make sense of them in terms of the arc of his career.”

Hopper has household name recognition that should bring larger crowds than usual to the museum, Saunders said, but Hopper fans should also learn something new about the famous artist. “Hopper’s relationship with Vermont is to a great degree unknown,” he said. “If you stop someone who is familiar with his work they’re going to name big oil paintings of his urban views or coastal Maine. Vermont is not going to come up, most likely.”

Saunders will be among those getting an education from the exhibition. “I don’t know exactly what he’s searching for,” Saunders said of Hopper’s Vermont work. “He’s exploring, he’s experimenting. Maybe the fact that he chose not to come back after ’38 is that he never really resolved it.” Vermont, Saunders said, may have helped Hopper reaffirm his interest in ideas he already had success with, and history might vouch for that theory: Hopper’s most famous work, the urban scene “Nighthawks,” was painted four years after his final Vermont visit.

“I think it’s going to be a fun experience to sort through,” Saunders said of the exhibition, which will feature most of Hopper’s Vermont work.

Even though Clause’s books contain images for most of Hopper’s Vermont works, she has only encountered three of the originals first-hand. That will change when Middlebury College presents its exhibition next spring, and her quest to discover Hopper’s work in Vermont becomes complete.

“Needless to say,” Clause told her audience at Phoenix Books, “I am very excited about seeing these paintings in person.”